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hate-listening to Bro Country
Thursday, September 8 2022
At noon today I drove out to the big abandoned bluestone quarry nearby to get some more stones for the patio I've been working on at the cabin, which I've decided is a bit too narrow. I brought both dogs with me, as they seem to like going for every possible car ride again after a weird hiatus. I drove to the road that leads up along the top of the mine's cliff face and found a number of really nice pieces just jumbled along that while the dogs sniffed around and ate grass (which both of them seem to like a little too much). While I was doing these things, I was listening to the local country music station, "the Wolf," which seems to specialize in Bro Country. I can find entertainment in listening to just about anything, including terrible music like Rodney Atkins' song "Watching You." It begins with some verses about a young son being made to eat all his "nuggets" (sounds healthy!) in a moving vehicle (likely a very large pickup truck). Then something happens to send french fries and sugar water flying, at which point the son unexpectedly utters "a word that begins with 's'." The chorus is all about how the son has been "watching" and learning from his dad, and this comes up multiple times in different contexts (a common Country Music pattern). Not only does Atkins' son learn to say "shit!" but he also learns to pray to God, which (to my thinking) is nearly as bad a form of child abuse as forcing your kid to eat something called a "nuggets."
This afternoon, I managed to resurrect an old Visual Studio "testing" project (written in the MSTest framework, something that's never actually clear in the code itself). I even got it to run inside Visual Studio, which provides a horrendous, deeply user interface for this. Somehow this interface managed to hide an authentication error saying my Microsoft Developer Network login had expired, and the damn tests kept failing to run for no reported reason. When I did finally see this error, VisualStudio naturally demanded two-factor authentication, and that almost pushed my rage over the edge.
At some point in the afternoon, my colleague Joe the Lead Developer announced that Queen Elizabeth II, who had been unwell for only about a day, was now dead. As a pragmatic mostly-unsentimental person, I don't have much interest in figurehead monarchs. But there has never been any other monarch in the United Kingdom for my entire life, so I could sense that this might be the end of some sort of era. Nobody I knew was devastated by the news, and the banter in the workplace Teams chat riffed on the possibility that Charles would abdicate and there would quickly be a King William. But Joe misspelled William so badly that it made me think of will.i.am, one of the guys in the Black Eyed Peas. Maybe he could be the next King. And if they needed a Queen and she had to come from the Black Eyed Peas, maybe it could be Queen Fergie.
Meanwhile Gretchen was off attending a shiva to note the passing of the father of our friend Lisa P. The plan after that was to go see the new Jordan Peele movie with Ray and Nancy afterwards (at around 9:00pm). That's late for me on a school night, but I'd reluctantly agreed to come because I wanted to make Gretchen happy and lessen her fears that I'm turning into my father (who progressively withdrew from society). But then after I got out of the bathtub and eaten a THC-containing gummie, I saw a direct message from Gretchen asking me to arrange a ride with Ray and Nancy. But Ray and Nancy were out and Nancy didn't have her phone, so my message didn't get seen. And then Gretchen bailed on the movie because for some reason she wanted to stay at the shiva. So I bailed on the evening myself, and eventually went down to the greenhouse so I could get away from the ever-needy cats.
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